Balancing Act

As mentioned previously, I'm somewhat terrified of the somewhat uncertain career future Zach and I face. I want to handle things with grace, but handling them means coming up with an actual plan.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to plan when you have not one, but two careers in their delicate, fragile infancy? 

When we were first dating and newly married, after frolicking with unicorns in a rainbow meadow, we would gaze deep into each others eyes and dream about our beautiful, utopian future of perfect equality and bliss. He would be a University professor at a lovely liberal arts school in Portland, I would have a Family law practice of my very own. We would each arrange our schedules so that one of us could always be at our lovingly restored 1920's home, babies playing with developmentally appropriate, organic wood toys or practicing the cello at our feet. Neither of us would be overly stressed by the demands of home or work, both of us would get to share in the joys of both equally. We would be perfect partners, total equals, supporting the hopes and dreams of each of us equally.

I still get a little starry eyed thinking about it.

The real world isn't nearly as simple as our naivety and romance induced hallucinations. At this point I'm not even talking about all the impossibilities of both of us finding wonderful part-time or otherwise flexible employment. For now, I'm just flumoxed as to how we can both even begin to pursue careers simulataneously.

So far things have been fairly simple. We both only applied to school in the DC area, solely on the basis that we couldn't think of another area that had so many schools that had programs we were interested in and had a shot at. Sure, neither of us went to what would have been our first choice if we were single, but all in all we were happy. It was a nice, teeny-tiny compromise. And probably the only and last easy compromise we'll face. 

Next year, I graduate, and need to take the bar somewhere and get a job in that same place, preferably a job with good future opportunities. At that exact same time, Zach will be sending out a second wave of PhD applications throughout the country, and if he has his way, preferably in foreign countries and hopefully accepting one of the many offers sent his way. Somehow we both need to make big commitments and end up in the same place, at the same time. Which is more than a little difficult.

We not only want to be in the same place, both of us pursuing our careers, but we also want to make choices that are good for other aspects of our future. It would be wonderful to start making little people at some point. Which of course would require us having a plan for how we would care for them. We should also start making money eventually, maybe even buy a house. It's amazing how quickly one decision can snowball until its not just choosing a job or a PhD program, but choosing every aspect of our future, recognizing that every option destroys certain future opportunities and creates others that are beyond our powers of imagination.

It would be so much simpler if one of us was the designated primary career person. Even if we wanted to, I'm not sure how we could choose. From a financial perspective, I not only have a higher earning potential than Zach, but I also have a scarily high amount of student loans, so me working to pay them off is somewhat essential. However, I also have the baby making and baby feeding parts, which makes me more likely to take the career backseat at some point, and more important for us to make choices now that will advance Zach's career. But neither of us want to tell the other person that their aspirations are second place in this marriage. That's just not how we roll. And in the end, we still really like our pie in the sky uber-equity dream. Of course, I also like the idea of a solid health care plan, but that doesn't make it a reality.

Fortunately, we have a little while to figure things out, and there are no rules in life against abruptly changing course. I may desperately want to have our future perfectly laid out for us, but that's not how life goes, and if I'm honest with myself, that's not how I would want it. Choosing amidst uncertainty may be one of the most terrifying parts of life, but its also what makes it really living.

Do any of you deal with the problems of balancing the careers of two people? How do you do it?

Cheesecake is a pie. period.

I'm very disappointed in my husband today. After dinner we got into a heated debate over the classification of a beloved dessert. Apparently, he is convinced by empty words rather than delicious truth, and thinks that cheesecake is a cake. Clearly this is idiotic. It's getting late, so I'll make my rebuttal quick. Not that it takes much time to prove the obvious.

1. Cake rises, pie does not. No normal cheese cake rises, ergo, pie.

2. Pie has a crust, cake does not. Cheese cake has a delicious, crumb crust. Another point for pie.

3. In Spanish cheesecake is known as "tarta de queso"queso being cheese and tarta being pie. Other languages also refer to it as a pie. Given that English is a notably odd language, I'm inclined to trust them.

4. It tastes more like a pie, more creamy and custardy than crumby and flourey.

5. It just is. 

Being like Clinton

Every time I see a photo of Secretary Clinton lately, I am struck by how beautifully happy she seems. I almost never see her without her face beaming in pure joy.

By many respects, she has no reason to be so happy. This woman was driven by a goal for years, working like crazy, pushing, striving, giving everything she had just to watch it slip away in the eleventh hour. Who would have blamed her for doing the bare minimum of campaigning afterwards and then fading away comfortably?

And yet, there she is, smiling away, arguably doing the best work of her life. She seems freer somehow, its almost like when she had to let go of what had been driving her for so long and accept the disappointment she was finally able to just do and be, free from all that pressure and perfection. I'm sure being President would have been wonderful for her, but so is what she's doing now.

Things have been a little discouraging at home lately. Zach just got his final letter from the PhD programs he applied for, his last in a string of rejections. This after working like crazy for the past two years on his often miserable masters and fixing his future on entering the academic world.

I still have a year before I have to face the world, and have been lucky enough to get some good news tossed my way. Still, almost every day now I check my e-mail to find another response from a Summer job, all of them polite, but none of them positive.

It's been hard for us (understandably, mostly for him). We both work and work hard (we procrastinate and laze about too, but in between that? Work.) We both have strong, beautiful dreams that we are essentially betting everything on right now. It's terrifying to see little hints that this gamble could not pay off, that everything could be for naught.

I want us to be like Secretary Clinton. To have the drive to go for something with all we have, and the grace to find joy in something else when things don't work out. I want us to be able to keep working towards our original goals just as strongly and passionately as Clinton worked towards hers. We don't want to let the fear of failure stop us, because we know that whatever happens, together, we'll find something wonderful about it.

My life with the Dish Zealot

One of the best things about Zach is that he does all of the dishes. Which, considering we don't have a dishwasher, is quite the undertaking. I wash the odd glass now and then, but by and large the dishes are his domain.

Unfortunately, that means that he can be a little overzealous in protecting his precious operation. I'll be cutting up some meat for dinner, turn away for one second and find that my knife has vanished. After retracing my steps, racking my brain as to where I could have put it, I finally catch a glimpse of its handle, bobbing around in the murky depths of the sink, soaking with all his other victims. See, Zach is also a little overenthusiastic in his belief that every has  to soak before it can be cleaned. I've tried to explain that soaking is only necessary if there is actually food crusted onto the item, but he insists otherwise. And since he does the dishes, the idea of anything developing a food crust and requiring a little extra scrub is his worst kind of horror. So, he vigilantly grabs anything he can see sitting out and thrusts it in to soak, never mind if I'm still using it or not.

It's almost impossible for me to cook without at least one dish related casualty. A few nights ago, after placing my diced raw peppers into the frying pan to saute, I turned to the fridge to grab an onion, destined to meet its end on the cutting board. Or at least it was, until in the blink of an eye it had meet a watery grave. Today I got a plate out to dish up some pasta for dinner, went to the stove and came back just in time to catch the culprit claiming yet another innocent victim. Sure, I can resuscitate them with a little soap, clean water and a dish towel, but it can be a little tiring trying to save the innocent dishes that get caught in his dish zealotry.

I swear, one of these days he's going to take a plate of food I've just dished up, assume that they're leftovers I carelessly left out, scoop the food into the trash and place the plate to soak. After all, you can never be to careful with the potential for food crusts. I'm glad he does the dishes vigilantly, I really am (mostly). But once, just once, I wish he could dial it down a tad.

A little more kindness

"You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.

We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the "lousiest petty bourgeois cheating."

But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.

If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man."

John F. Kennedy, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, NYC April 27, 1961

 Perhaps it's not the purest reason to treat others kindly, but avoiding the creation of disgruntled super villains is certainly an effective one. Zach and I have been indulging our inner child by watching classic Batman cartoons on Saturday mornings, and it is amazing how many villains got their start as geniuses who were knocked down one too many times. It's probably best to just stay on the safe side. 



(I'm not saying Marx counts as a super villain. He was kind of a schmuck, and many of those inspired by his writings haven't exactly been the best examples of humanity. But come one, the guy just wrote something influential and interesting, he didn't create city destroying robots or anything.)

Thanks

You are all wonderful people. It is such an amazing feeling to throw out a little piece of myself into the vastness of the internet and get sincere well-wishes from 14 people, only two of who I know from the so-called "real" world. Thanks, I was beaming all day.

Other than smiling at my screen, things were fairly uneventful today. We cleaned, I tried to take pictures of the apartment to share here. Is it sad that my main motivation for cleaning was that afterwards I could take pictures and share online? (It will hurt my vanity enough to share the hand me down/IKEA chic of the shoebox, sharing what it looks like most days is just to much for me.) My blog should not be my primary motivation to do basic life sustaining things. I suppose it doesn't much matter, I tried to be fancy and use the manual settings on my point and shoot camera. While it was an excellent reminder of how non-ready I am for a DSLR, the pictures are so dark that the faint outlines of furniture are the only proof that I was trying to photograph an apartment, not a dank cave where foolish tourists get eaten by mole people. Maybe I can get decent photographic evidence of the shoebox next week.

Accepted

Yay! I just found out that I was accepted into the Women and the Law Clinic for next year. I'm quite thrilled, especially as this year they had so many applicants to clinic that they had to turn away 55 people (most years they are able to let everyone in to a clinic, but this year we are all terrified for our future job prospects and desperate for some real experience).

I'm very excited, and only slightly terrified of the reality of it all, especially after paying $120 for malpractice insurance. You guys, I get to go and do real lawyer stuff, for real people. I could completely screw up, ruin their lives and be sued for malpractice, just like a real lawyer! Or, you know, be amazing and use my lawyer powers for good. Either way, I'm still excited.